UNDATED (CNN) -- It travelled nearly 6,000 kilometers and took sixteen years but a man in France has recovered a message in a bottle sent from a teenager Quebec. And today the two met face to face, albeit separated by an ocean.

It may seem cliché to say it was a dark and stormy night, but that's what it took it seems for this plastic bottle to finally wash up on a beach in France.

Lucien Sanquer found the bottle and the treasure inside: a Canada flag and a letter written by a 16-year-old Nicolas Morin.

Morin received a letter from the town where he grew up. It seems someone had found something that once belonged to him. And that someone would like to talk to him about it.

He thought it was a joke. But some French media outlets picked up the story. And he says he's been getting a lot of messages from friends wondering what's going on.

The message isn't quite as romantic as what you might see in the movies. And Morin wrote the note in English, a language he doesn't speak.

Morin is pretty sure it wasn't him who threw the bottle in the water in the first place. He says the message was part of a school project.

And he figures his professor gathered an armload of messages in bottles and heaved them into the water.

Whatever the circumstances, Morin and Sanquer are both pretty stunned to be speaking to each other, even if it's just over the internet.